Bagehot

A wit may also be wise

In praise of an unconventional democrat and guardian of the original Bagehot’s memory

HIS foes saw only snobbery and a peacock's weakness for dazzle and colour. In truth Norman St John-Stevas, who died on March 2nd, aged 82, drew delight and succour from pageantry and tradition as others take warmth from the sun.

An important memory dated back to his teenage years, when the future academic, journalist and Conservative politician watched the wedding procession of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. In middle age, an Icarus-like government career (a shimmering rise, cut short by incaution) already behind him, he recalled the strength and comfort that he derived from that glimpse of royalty in a glass coach: a “shaft of light” amid the “physical and spiritual greyness” of post-war Britain.

Yet Lord St John of Fawsley, as he became, saw more than glitter in the great institutions of state. He saw a valuable, oak-beam solidity beneath their gilded sheen. And he was convinced that though the British public are a mistrustful lot, deep down they share that yearning for strong constitutional structures.

His beliefs were reinforced by study of Walter Bagehot, a Victorian writer and editor of The Economist. St John-Stevas, who was a correspondent at this newspaper before entering Parliament in 1964, spent two decades editing Bagehot's complete works, in 15 volumes. (He also tracked down the great man's 89-year-old nephew, who fondly remembered his uncle and how he pronounced his name. It's with a soft “g”, as in badger.)

Both men saw the monarchy as embodying the “dignified” parts of the state, conveying serene continuity while politicians squabble. A paternalist, St John-Stevas shared his hero's view that to be a member of Parliament was a splendid thing—at least when an MP was free to follow his judgment, rather than instructions from constituents (St John-Stevas spent years defying his Essex electors, notably voting to abolish the death penalty, to outlaw racial discrimination and to legalise homosexuality).

He loved to cite Bagehot's view that the “essence of Toryism is enjoyment”. Rather more furtively, he quoted Bagehot's faith in the “stupidity” of the English, by which he meant a stolid resistance to novelty, and thus to the wilder excesses of ideology.

St John-Stevas was an elitist, sometimes outrageously so. He was also a democrat and much concerned with social justice. Out of that tangle of beliefs came his greatest legacy: the system of MPs' select committees overseeing each government department that he established in his brief time as Leader of the House of Commons. To achieve it, he had to fight fellow-ministers, who rightly foresaw “a shock to the system” and a huge increase in scrutiny, says Lord Fowler, a former cabinet minister. But St John-Stevas was willing to fortify tradition with a dose of progress, says Lord Lamont, a former chancellor of the exchequer and a friend for 40 years: “He was above all a Tory romantic. He loved Victoriana, he loved Parliament, Disraeli and Gladstone, but he saw the good things in modernity.”

Many tributes have dwelt on his personal contradictions. They describe a boundless immodesty redeemed by self-mocking wit—on being accused of name-dropping, St John-Stevas is said to have sighed: “The queen said the exactly same to me yesterday.” Obituarists recount his bleakest hour, when indiscretion and an inability to resist a dissenting quip saw him sacked from the cabinet by Margaret Thatcher, his beloved “Leaderene”. With more or less delicacy, the press linked his dramatic personal style (he had a weakness for purple shirts, cherished his friendships with princesses and owned a framed pair of Queen Victoria's stockings) to his unacknowledged homosexuality.

St John-Stevas was an unusual man, who would struggle to be selected as a Tory now (for one thing, he was a committed pro-European). But a focus on quirks misses a larger lesson to be drawn from his passing. As an MP, St John-Stevas enjoyed political and moral constraints and freedoms that would have been broadly recognisable to Bagehot, a century earlier. By the time of his death, those constraints had turned through 180 degrees.

Don't mention Burke

Entering politics in the 1950s, St John-Stevas had little choice but to conceal part of who he was—a gay man—albeit beneath a carapace of campness, a form of hiding in plain sight. Today four Tory government ministers are openly gay.

A far bigger risk would now be run by voicing that which St John-Stevas believed: that an MP should obey his judgment rather than voters or his local party. Though loyal to his seat of Chelmsford, St John-Stevas did not relish pavement politics. It is related that, under pressure at one election from Liberal activists counting each night he spent in the seat, the MP found a flat above the railway station, allowing him to be seen heading to bed in Chelmsford before discreetly catching the London train.

A lynching might await an MP who quoted St John-Stevas (who was in turn quoting Bagehot) that a key role for Parliament is “educating the nation”—chewing over hard questions with greater knowledge and information than the common voter, then disseminating that wisdom via the reporting of debates. A new survey by YouGov, a pollster, finds that only a quarter of Britons think Parliament does a good job of discussing issues of concern to them, and that—by two to one—they want MPs to be not representatives but delegates, voting according to constituents' wishes. More voters think that big policy decisions should be determined by referendum than by parliamentary debate.

Ironically, Parliament's best counter-argument may rest in select committees, which have in recent months held police chiefs, press barons and ministers to squirming account. St John-Stevas was hardly a populist (another ministerial legacy was doubling MPs' salaries). But distrustful, angry Britain should salute him.